A popular technique for accelerating external domains in a non-secure manner is through the use of site acceleration. Traditionally, to accelerate a complete domain, each site of a domain was associated with a reverse proxy which accelerated and managed data delivery for a particular site of that domain. A reverse proxy resides within the local environment of a site that is being accelerated.
In addition to reverse proxies, there are forward and transparent proxies which are used locally to cache and accelerate data to clients. A forward proxy is a service that a local client knows about and is configured to directly interact with when the client requests a resource of an external domain. A transparent proxy is a service that the local client is unaware of and is unknowingly routed to when the local client requests a resource of the external domain.
Data acceleration occurs by the proxies maintaining caching data associated with the external domain within the local environment of the client. The client experiences improved data delivery and response time because data associated with needed resources or services of the external domain are housed locally within the proxies and vended to the client when needed. Thus, in many instances, the data needed by a client is locally available before the client requests that data and communication with a resource of the external domain is not needed at the time that the client makes the requests.
A domain is a logical collection of sites, resources, or services all identified by a common portion of an Internet Protocol (IP) address. For example, the site www.novell.com identifies a domain name of novell.com, which translates into a specific hierarchical portion of an IP address. The domain novell.com can be associated with a plurality of sites (services or resources), such as: sales.novell.com, support.novell.com, and access.novell.com. The services and resources can be further organized within specific sites associated with the domain.
Conventionally, to accelerate the entire domain of novell.com a reverse proxy is needed for each separate site of the domain. Recent technologies introduced by Novell, Inc. of Provo, Utah permit a single domain accelerator to be configured, such that all sites of a domain can be accelerated by a single service; rather than achieving acceleration via a plurality of separately configured reverse proxies.
Some domains are associated with secure communications, such as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS), referred to as HTTPS. Secure communications are generally not cached in the local environments of clients, rather, the proxies establish a secure communications tunnel with the secure domains, sites, services, or resources and the proxies establish a secure communications tunnel with the clients. As a result, local data acceleration associated with secure communications has generally not been available in the networking arts, since secure communications data is not locally cached.
However, recent techniques, such as the ones described in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/784,440 entitled “Techniques for Managing and Accelerating Data Delivery” has changed this by providing techniques for securely accelerating remote sites within the local environments of clients.
Conventionally, external domains have been securely accelerated through the use of reverse proxies. A reverse proxy resides in the external domain and is external to the client and the client's environment. A reverse proxy provides more management benefits to the external domain than it provides acceleration benefits to the client. This is so, because the data contents of the reverse proxy's cache for the external domain are not cached within the local environments of requesting clients.
Thus, improved techniques for securely managing and accelerating external domains within local environments of clients are needed.